"I'm an Oakland boy and I'll always be an Oakland boy, but if being
close to you means traveling into the festering hellhole that is New
York, then to the festering hellhole I shall go." (Jason Shiga, Empire
State)

Wednesday, 27 September 2017

"They were silent now, watching the darting flight of the birds into the
trees. Behind them they could hear the clatter of a sewing machine:
Riley's mother was sewing for the white folks. It was quiet, and as the
woman worked, her voice rose above the whirring machine in song." (Ralph
Ellison)

"Lyotard mocks our desire to say it all, to know it all, warning us
against any neat tidying up and closing down of thought; his energy
derives from an opening up to the mode of uncertainty which carries many
different names: Dérive, 1968, Les Immatériaux, childhood." (Kiff
Bamford)

"I decided to lop him off if it meant a smother party. (This is a
rural English custom designed to eliminate aged and bedfast dependents. A
family so afflicted throws a 'smother party' where the guests pile
mattresses on the old liability, climb up on top of the mattresses and
lush themselves out.)" (Burroughs, Naked Lunch)

Nothing like death stepped, nothing like death paused, Nothing like death has such hair, arms so raised. Why are your feet bare? Was not death to come? Why is he not here? What summer have you broken from?

When I was a child, I thought Casually, that solitude Never needed to be sought. Something everybody had, Like nakedness, it lay at hand, Not specially right or specially wrong, A plentiful and obvious thing Not at all hard to understand.

Tuesday, 19 September 2017

"The artist John James Audubon described one flock [of passenger
pigeons] he saw in 1813. 'The air was literally filled with pigeons,' he
wrote. 'The light of noon day was obscured as by an eclipse, the dung
fell in spots, not unlike melting flakes of snow.'" (Jim Robbins, The
Wonder of Birds)

"Dial describes to me three types of walking. He holds up the first
finger to further explain. 'You and I and bears are PLANTIGRADE. In
other words, we plant our heels and toes and walk off our toes.' He
holds up a second finger. 'Your cat and dog are DIGITIGRADES. They walk
on their digits. Lastly a horse, wildebeest, or goat walks on its
toenails. It's called UNGULIGRADE,' he adds, raising a third finger.
'Birds,' he concludeds, with admiration, 'do all of those things.'" (Jim
Robbins, The Wonder of Birds)

Sunday, 17 September 2017

Yesterday began the exhibition
Songlines at the National Museum of Australia. "Seven Sisters" myth is
all over Australia. Each tribal myth in this sense is an actual map and a
"petite ritournelle." All together they form a "grande ritournelle,"
the Earth.

"Far more nectar is available to birds in Australia than on other
continents---enough to fight over, and harsh cries assert possession.
Australia's eucalypts and paperbarks (Melaleuca) are the only
bird-pollinated trees on earth to form vast forests, and wattlebirds and
lorikeets are important pollinators of their flowers." (Tim Low, WHERE
SONG BEGAN)

"If the voice is not speaking to him it must be speaking to another. So
with what reason remains he reasons. To another of that other. Or of
him. Or of another still. To another of that other or of him of another
still." (Beckett)

Tuesday, 12 September 2017

I am now in Canberra, staying at ANU's guest house. Later this week I'll be participating in these events! If you are in the area (or in Australia anyway) please do plan to attend. This will make history.

"And what are my fears? What large cows! When I see them coming, shall I
run and lie face down in the gutter? Are they really cows? Can I stand
in a field of tall grass and see nothing for miles and miles? On the
other hand, the sky, which is big and blue as always, has its limits.
This afternoon the wind is loud as in a hurricane." (Jamaica Kincaid)

"Those voices pull in two directions, back through the political and
cultural traumas of Ireland, and out towards the urgencies and
experience of the world beyond it. At school I studied the Gaelic
literature of Ireland as well as the literature of England, and since
then I have maintained a notion of myself as Irish in a province that
insists that it is British. Lately I realized that these complex pieties
and dilemmas were implicit in the very terrain where I was born."
(Seamus Heaney)

"I would begin with the Greek word, omphalos, meaning the navel, and
hence the stone that marked the centre of the world, and repeat it,
omphalos, omphalos, omphalos, until its blunt and falling music becomes
the music of somebody pumping water at the pump outside our back door."
(Seamus Heaney)

Tuesday, 5 September 2017

"Concepts are not waiting for us ready-made, like heavenly bodies. There
is no heaven for concepts. They must be invented, fabricated, or rather
created and would be nothing without their creator's signature."
(Deleuze & Guattari)

"Beyond the heronry, if it were cloudy as yesterday, the seagreen and
the mintgreen of the morass grass, the moonstone blue of the river
surface absorbing the muted light, the celadon blue of the Japan Sea
laced with the breaker waves in oxidized silver, and the liquid jade
green sky with fat cream poured in--all those colors would be fused and
mirror on one's cornea behind the cool veil of the early autumn." (Kyoko
Yoshida)

Friday, 1 September 2017

"You repeat some of his early mispronunciations of words: hangaburger
for hamburger, human bean for human being, chuthers for each other--as
in THEY KISSED THEIR CHUTHERS--and the perfectly logical but demented
MOMMY'S AMI, following a reference by your mother to the city of Miami."
(Paul Auster)